One of the things that happens about cloud is it changes so quickly. If I've had to give in this answer just six months ago, Oracle had four components in their PaaS portfolio, and today, they've got thirty-two. By the time someone watches this video, the number could be whatever. It's very difficult to talk about what's the best part of it, because it's changing all of the time. I'd say the one that excites me the most at the moment are the integration cloud and the mobile cloud. Allowing people to connect to their enterprise and then make that mobile for people, because that's what people need more and more in their enterprises.

My recommendation is always talk to someone who is doing it or who understands it. The PaaS portfolio is changing all the time, so you're not going to be able to find someone who has done exactly what you want to do already. What you need is someone who understands that roadmap, understands the technology that's being offered to you. Then sit down and get them to understand your use case, and then work with them on how, what is the possibilities, what can be done with it.

Go for it.

It is important to choose a good partner to go with.

If you know the middleware solution of Oracle called ADF, MAF will feel similar. It is easy to consume a REST web service and it allows you to cache automatically the received data into a SQLite database. With that, you can automatically work offline against this database. Changes are logged and you have the ability to sync the "dirty data" back to the server afterwards. This is a real benefit and is easy to use. Additionally, it allows you to deploy to all the big environments like Apple, Android, and Windows, so there's only one development and multiple rollout possibilities.

A big question for "bring you own device" ideas is the way to handle de-installations and the company's data on a private device. Oracle offers a good sandbox solution for this which can be very helpful to administrate and distribute apps (Oracle Mobile Security Suite).

MCS should be used for the corresponding use cases and for implementing Single Purpose APIs, a.k.a., Backend For Frontend to be used with Mobile apps. The platform should not be seen as an API Management solution. For implementing a consistent API Management approach, Oracle API Platform Cloud Service should be used.

I advise people to explore and implement apps using Oracle MAF. I also encourage people to try out Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) which is the best value add products for enterprises trying to build mobile apps.

I would highly recommend Oracle MAF as it is:

1. Single Platform – It handles end-to-end life cycle for enterprise mobility solutions.
   
2. Hybrid Framework – It supports developing Android and iOS applications with Single Source Code.
   
3. Easy for Developers - to adopt using existing skills
   It supports standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
   Java forms the core for Business Logic.
   It is available as a plug-in for both JDeveloper 12.1.3 and Eclipse IDEs.
   
4. Speeds up UI development:
   It is based on MVC framework,
   It consists of in-built UI components and CSS features,
   It uses declarative custom components for drag & drop development,
   The platform enables accessing device features such as camera, contacts, GPS etc. using in-built Cordova plug-in,
   Additional plug-ins which allows extension of app’s functionality such as barcode scanning is also available,
   It supports development of applications that can work in offline mode by using local SQLite database,
   Developers can debug the applications using the framework.
   
5. Security – It includes extended enterprise security with in-built security framework.

Oracle MAF is designed for larger companies who are already running Oracle Fusion middleware products. Oracle MAF can be easily integrated with other Oracle Solutions and then it increases the productivity and the speed for delivering Mobile Solutions. However, it should be considered if it makes sense buying licenses of Oracle MAF or using free frameworks are enough.

If you are using other tools from the Oracle stack, and are considering the implementation of mobile solutions, you should definitely consider using Oracle MAF. MAF development is similar to the development of other Oracle Middleware tools/frameworks, thus enabling your existing developer pool to work on the mobile solutions. I would also advice to at least look at Oracle MCS. Oracle MCS can actually help you to open up your enterprise to the mobile landscape, without directly exposing it to the big bad mobile world.

This product is not recommended for a small business. Oracle MAF is suitable for a large company that has an integrated system with other Oracle products. Please take into consideration the performance, price, and size of the application of this product. You need to check if it fits with your business needs.

Some screenshots of a mobile app I worked on...

MAF is easy to learn

The product looks very promising specially if you already have an many Oracle production in-house like Oracle SOA.

It lacks a number of out of the box features. Additionally, debugging and diagnosing is a bit tricky and not much time has been spent by Oracle on improving the UI.

I would say that it's pretty rock solid from the foundation. It's dependable for using in products and systems.